Civil War In The Cities
Time and again, the capacity for large-scale, semi-organized violence has been demonstrated.
Did you hear about the civil unrest in Philadelphia the other night?
Several stores in Philadelphia were looted by more than 100 juveniles Tuesday night, according to police.
The Footlocker and Apple stores near 15th and Chestnut and the Lululemon store in Center City were all looted, according to NBC10.
Multiple videos of the looting were posted to social media and show police officers trying to arrest people while windows are smashed and items are stolen.
The looting comes after a judge’s decision to drop the charges against a Philadelphia police officer who shot and killed a driver.
About 100 supporters of the man who was shot – Eddie Irizarry – came together at City Hall to protest the decision to drop all charges — including murder — against Mark Dial, a former Philadelphia police officer who fatally shot Irizarry during a traffic stop last month, the Philadelphia Inquirer says.
It’s tiresome hearing them referred to as “juveniles” (if they were adults, would they be referred to as such?), but we’ll let that go. This was a state of total disorder while it lasted and the damage done was tremendous.
Take a look at these videos of the rioting (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT):
https://twitter.com/rawsalerts/status/1706840403717017608
https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1706844904083931555
Here’s a liquor store being looted, since liquor is a basic necessity for survival:
https://twitter.com/gaborgurbacs/status/1707099012501852435
Everything was fair game, including this Popeyes. As Ann Coulter said, “if this were a movie, it’d be canceled for racism:”
https://twitter.com/Z4Bitch/status/1706855028051304902
Here’s a 6ABC Philadelphia report on the unrest:
I’m not going to comment on the shooting itself, except to reiterate what I said a few essays ago: police shootings don’t seem to galvanize public sentiment like it once did. It’s interesting that even with the far-left Joe Biden in power, the Regime cannot get Americans to care about purported police misconduct any longer. It’s like they exhausted our collective appetite for it with 2020.
That said, after being cleared of charges, the officer has been re-charged, something I’ve never seen before. I can’t speak on the legal implications of this, though I’ll say, in our age of activist-prosecutors, it seems they’ll just keep at it until they get the outcome they want, rule of law be damned.
Not that it matters. Groups like Black Lives Matter have proven themselves to be hollow and regard life as cheap. Far from being the “voice of the unheard,” these riots are just nihilistic outbursts of exuberance. This brings me to the point of this entry, which is that the Philadelphia riots confirmed a fact that’s been on my mind for a while now: there exists a capacity for major insurrection in our urban areas, something I discussed in depth a few entries ago. For the past few years, “insurrection” has come to mean something like 2021 Capitol Hill riot, an overtly political act. But an insurrection is basically a rebellion and what is a riot if not a rebellion? Any attempt to overwhelm authorities, which is what happened in Philadelphia, is an insurrection. Meeting it with force is more than appropriate. Not to mention, the riots were in response to a politically-charged legal decision, was it not?
We’re still in the early stages of this intensifying low-intensity internal conflict. But I think it’s safe to say it’ll be especially acute in urbanized areas, primarily due to the concentration of the criminal class in these areas. We already know the looting that’s become alarmingly normal in the last few years is actually well-organized, which means it’s likely to be sustained for the foreseeable future unless the authorities make a concerted attempt to put a stop to it.
Which brings me back to the biggest concern - that a full-throated attempt to squash criminality and make our cities safe like those in Japan, which all Americans claim to want, will be met with a terrifying backlash. Not from a fed-up citizenry, but from the criminals themselves. Being able to engage in criminality with relatively light consequences or, in some cases, none at all, isn’t a privilege they’ll relinquish easily.
It’s for this reason some, but not all, policymakers are so leery about taking a straightforward approach to law and order. Now, I don’t think we can ever make our cities as safe as Tokyo or Osaka. To be frank, we’re not Japanese. Americans are far too tolerant of deviance and much too open for us to ever possess the “stiffness” required to make our cities as safe as those of East Asia. But that doesn’t mean we need to tolerate rampant lawlessness, either. Most Americans today wouldn’t believe it if you told them, but we used to have our own system of enforcement that relied on as much citizenry as it did government to enforce the rule of law and uphold the social order. Sometime during the last 50 - 70 years, we decided this was an oppressive system and instead declared the state supreme and absolved society of any responsibility to maintain order.
Look where we ended up.
No, we’re not in a state of total anarchy, but the existing order is becoming increasingly inconsistent and unpredictable. It’s managed anarchy, a.k.a. “anarcho-tyranny.” The state will never do what needs to be done to establish rule of law and order, they’ll just do enough to put on a veneer of compassion and competency and prevent the situation from getting completely out of control. But how much control do they even have at this point?
Yesterday, the rioting and looting continued for a second straight night in Philadelphia. From FOX News:
Philadelphia suffered its second night in a row of mass looting incidents and destructive social media-fueled mayhem on Wednesday, resulting in more than 50 arrests, police said.
On Wednesday, groups of thieves, apparently working together, destroyed property in several areas of the city, smashed their way into stores, and stole as much as they could before fleeing, authorities said. Suspects also ransacked more than a dozen state-run liquor stores so thoroughly that the state announced it was closing its Philly locations until further notice.
Video on social media also suggested that culprits made off with a Wells Fargo ATM, but a spokesperson for Wells Fargo told Fox News Digital that the ATM was not stolen and that the bank does not currently have an ATM in that location as it is being replaced.
Really - how many more times can you endure this? How many more times can you clean up, move on like nothing happened, and go back to the way things were before, until the next blow-up? I think I’ve established time and again these cycles can repeat themselves into virtual perpetuity, but nothing lasts forever, either. It’s not just politicians who are responsible for things never changing or getting worse. It’s also because the public finds it more convenient to take the loss, clean up the mess other people made, pick up the pieces, and move on. Life’s too short for fixing big problems, anyway.
Still, you have to wonder how many times these cycles can repeat themselves and what would happen if they stopped cleaning up the mess one day. If you think I’m being hyperbolic in asking, it’s not far-fetched. Look at what’s happening as a result of rampant theft and unacceptable safety risks. All this stuff that doesn’t seem to matter, it adds up:
Target Corp. will shutter nine stores across four states on Oct. 21 because of theft and threats to safety, the company announced Tuesday, the latest — and loudest —example of a retailer exiting urban locations because of crime.
Target said it made the “difficult decision” to close the stores — which include locations in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, Seattle, Portland and the San Francisco Bay area — after the Minneapolis-based company determined that theft-preventive measures had proved ineffective. The company said it had tried adding more security, including third-party guards, and using deterrents such as locking up merchandise.
“We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests and contributing to unsustainable business performance,” the company said. “We know that our stores serve an important role in their communities, but we can only be successful if the working and shopping environment is safe for all.”
So yeah, maybe we are reaching the end of our tolerance for rampant lawlessness. Of course, this leads to an exodus out of the cities by both businesses and residents (derisively labeled as “White flight”), which begs the question: what if there’s nothing left to steal? What if you run out of people to terrorize? Mind you, crime is a problem everywhere and even the nice areas aren’t immune to the theft epidemic.
Look at what happened in Irvine, California back in August. Irvine is the one city in America where nothing ever happens and qualifies as Tokyo-style safe.
Three men are being sought in connection with a smash-and-grab robbery at an Irvine jewelry store that was caught on video.
The incident was reported around 12:20 p.m. Monday at Jewels by Alan on Jamboree Road and Michelson Drive, according to the Irvine Police Department.
The men smashed display cases with hammers and allegedly stole almost $900,000 worth of jewelry by putting them in trash cans they brought with them.
Video shared on social media shows the suspect wearing all black, and though their identity is concealed, police say the suspects are Black men.
There’s a difference between criminal violence and the type of violence most of us will will ever be subject to, which is the result of social encounters gone poorly. The latter can happen anywhere, even in the safest of places. Criminal activity is an entirely different problem, since it involves habitual and willful disobedience towards the law. It’s a whole different social order being imposed, making it an invasion of sorts.
I don’t try to scare anyone, but I’m not going to shy away from the truth either. The suburbs, the “nice” areas, they aren’t just dwindling in number, but they’re becoming less immune to lawlessness. If you think there’s nothing wrong in your neighborhood, download and check the Nextdoor app. You might be surprised to see what’s going on all around you. In the past, even with the crime rate being much higher, it was possible to contain crime to bad areas, but this is no longer possible today. Much of this is because crime is as much a political and social phenomenon as anything else and nobody’s willing to put up much of a fight against it, not at the moment.
There’s still time, however. If you want to prepare, now’s as good a time as any to do so. Unfortunately, far too many still don’t see the need to do so. For far too many, crime is both not a problem and the result of our failures as a society. Maybe they’re right on that second point, but if crime isn’t a problem, what problem is there to fix? The practical advice I have to give you at the moment is to not listen to these people and don’t let them deter you from prepping for disorder. You’re responsible for your own lives, your own families, and your own households. Not them. If they choose to pretend like everything’s as normal as its ever been, if they choose to embrace the decline, that’s up to them. Their fate is of no relevance to you, so don’t even think about it.
As for the cities, I think it’s too late for them. A concerted attempt at making them safe would spark something akin to a civil war and that’s no exaggeration. Time and again, the capacity for large-scale, semi-organized violence has been demonstrated. In the event relations between authorities and the criminal element deteriorate to open hostility (if we’re not already there), we could see civil war-like conditions in our cities. If not an all-out shooting war, then certainly an urban guerrilla insurgency. If relations between authorities and criminals don’t deteriorate to open hostility, then what we’re looking at it a perpetual repeating of these cycles of unrest, until, again, they run out of things to steal and people to terrorize. Then they set their sights on new targets.
Either way, it points to a bleak future.
I’m not trying to blackpill anyone here, but I also think we’re all overdue for a reality check. With thousands of migrants streaming across the border, a destabilizing situation is becoming even more so. I just don’t see how nothing bad comes of this. I wish I could provide something more substantive than I have here, but this is the best I can manage. You’re talking a massive under-class flooding our urban areas, who already have a high concentration of those who already engage in criminality and violence as a way of life. How does this not end in conflict, civil war or otherwise?
They may be further along the timeline than we are, but I feel like we are gradually reaching the point where France is today. Over the summer, massive riots broke out after a police officer shot and killed a youth of Algerian heritage in a traffic stop. In writing about it, I quoted something Rod Dreher was told when he was in France a few years ago and I’ll post it again here, because this is what’s on my mind [bold mine]:
If the suburbs all go off at the same time, France does not have enough police and military personnel to restore order. Everyone in power, both in the military and the civil government, knows this. So do the thugs of the suburbs. Anything could spark this conflagration. Anything. It could go off any day. This is what accounts for a lot of the deep anxiety in French life today. That, and the fact that there is no clear solution, and maybe no solution at all.
Replace “France” with “America” and the shoe still fits, if imperfectly so. Maybe most Americans today don’t feel the anxiety being described here, but let’s face it, Americans aren’t allowed to speak openly about such things, either. If things continue to get worse, however, more people will feel more insecure about the situation. We’re still human, after all. And like France, there’s no clear answer to fixing any of this and if history is any guide, there’s no answer at all. The storm can’t be stopped, it can only be weathered.
What about you? Are any of you not pessemistic about the situation? Why? Do you think there’s a clear solution and it can be implemented? Let’s discuss in the comments section below.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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